A North Carolina mom started serving a week-long jail sentence for having her daughter baptized, according to reports. The 2016 baptism at St. Peter’s Catholic Church when the girl was 2 years old defied a judge’s order in a custody battle between unmarried couple, Kendra Stocks and Paul Schaaf, who are no longer together.

Can states just say “no” to foreign refugees? Tennessee is testing that proposition in federal court. Tennessee vs. U.S. Department of State is a case every state and taxpayer should watch closely in light of new FAIR research showing per-capita refugee costs running nearly $80,000 over five years. Like other states, Tennessee experienced a surge in refugee arrivals during the Obama administration, with attendant increases in social-service costs to the state and its localities. The FAIR study does not break down the costs by state. Nor does it incorporate all the expenses incurred by them. So the $80,000 price tag...

A top GOP donor in Florida is threatening to withhold contributions to candidates and political groups that do not get behind a ban on assault weapons, The New York Times reported. In an email to half a dozen Republican leaders on Saturday, Florida-based real estate developer Al Hoffman Jr. decried the rash of mass shootings that has roiled the U.S. for years, and demanded that GOP politicians take action. "I will not write another check unless they all support a ban on assault weapons," Hoffman wrote in the email, according to the Times. "Enough is enough!"

In 2005, American scientists deliberately sent a rocket to collide with a comet. After the collision, scientists were able to conduct a detailed analysis of the internal composition of the comet from the spectrum of debris ejected from the crater. It was a considerable achievement. But my friend working for NASA commented on this event differently: "You have no idea how many doctoral dissertations were thrown in the toilet yesterday." We have no idea how many heart attacks occurred in Washington yesterday due to Special Counsel Mueller's indictment. And how many political careers will be thrown into the toilet today....

"If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your (missing email) situation," Trump said, "because there has never been so many lies, so much deception."

As the Wall Street Journal observes in the related editorial today (behind the Journal’s paywall): “The 37-page indictment contains no evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, but it does show a systematic effort to discredit the result of the 2016 election. On the evidence so far, President Trump has been the biggest victim of that effort, and he ought to be furious at Vladimir Putin.” The Journal editorial asks a good question: “The indictment also makes us wonder what the Obama Administration was doing amid all of this. Where were top Obama spooks James Clapper and John...

Clint Eastwood did it again with his newest film, The 15:17 to Paris. The 87-year-old icon drove liberal critics batty with his 2014 smash American Sniper. Heroism? Sacrifice? All-American values? It’s like garlic to some film critics. They’d rather swoon at films depicting the U.S. Military in an unsavory fashion. The 15:17 to Paris makes their jobs harder. The story focuses on three heroes (playing themselves) who thwarted a terrorist attack aboard a Paris-bound train in 2015.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said in a rare public appearance Thursday he’s exhausted with how everyone seems to consider themselves a victim these days. “At some point, we’re going to be fatigued with everybody being the victim,” Thomas, the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court, said during an on-stage interview at the Library of Congress in Washington. Thomas, a conservative appointed to the bench in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, recalled recently being with a young black woman in Kansas who told him, “I’m really tired of having to play the role of being black....

Once upon a time, American schools were something to be proud of, with high expectations and students who – by some accounts – graduated high school with what is now the equivalent of two years of college under their belts. Most schools were under local control and were highly responsive to parents. Today all that has changed. We rank 36th on the world stage. Despite spending on average $12,000 per student per year, public education has become a joke. Why? There are endless reasons, but I’ll give two. One, public education does not permit competition among schools. Journalist and columnist...

WASHINGTON, DC, February 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) abruptly rescinded its acceptance of pro-family group MassResistance as an exhibitor at its annual national meeting next week while permitting the pro-LGBT group, Log Cabin Republicans, to remain. In a stinging statement issued by MassResistance in response to CPAC “banning” the group, founder Brian Camenker asked, “Is the ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’ really conservative?” CPAC had officially approved MassResistance for a table in January, but last week CPAC Executive Director Dan Schneider notified the organization that it had been disinvited. CPAC justified its decision citing the group’s...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said on Friday that she will introduce legislation to raise the minimum legal age to buy rifles in the wake of a school shooting in Florida. Feinstein said the legislation would require anyone buying a firearm from a gun dealer to be at least 21 years old. “Under current law, licensed gun dealers cannot sell a handgun to anyone under 21, but they are allowed to sell assault rifles like the AR-15 to anyone over 18. This policy is dangerous and makes absolutely no sense," Feinstein said. She added that "if you can’t buy a handgun...

As usual, it seemed to come out of nowhere. And, as usual, it didn’t. The murderer who took the lives of 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., was on everybody’s radar, from the school authorities to the local police to the FBI, which failed to follow its own protocols when a person close to the future killer called to warn the bureau that he was contemplating a school massacre. Everybody knew, nobody did anything. What should be done? Gun control, the Left says, always, offering ideas that range from the trivial to the patently unconstitutional. Whatever the...

The Committee to Defend the President released a poll late Friday that shows Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN-07) trounces Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup in the Tennessee Republican U.S. Senate primary by more than 2-to-1, 55 percent to 26 percent. Corker announced on September 26 that he would not seek a third term in the U.S. Senate, but he has floated several trial balloons over the past several days that he is having second thoughts about that decision. The poll was released at almost the same time that former Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN-08) announced that he was...

Moderator: ...in Massachusetts although you backed away from mandates on a national basis. Mitt Romney: No, no I like mandates. Fred Thompson: Beg your pardon. I didn't know you were gonna admit that. Mitt Romney: Oh, absolutely. Fred Thompson: You like mandates. Mitt Romney: Let me tell you what kind of mandates I like, Fred. Fred Thompson: The ones you come up with! (nodding of heads and laughter)

This will be a weekly post. Count remains at 24. However, there are approximately thirty nominations awaiting votes on the Senate floor. If McConnell gets the wheels turning, he can confirm one a day over the next month or so and clear the backlog. It's also worthwhile to note that Chuck Grassley's committee voted to send Michael Brennan's nomination to the floor this week, which Tammy Baldwin tried to stop with her blue slip.

The pols and pundits most insistent upon holding a gun-control “conversation” in the wake of mass shootings at schools did the most to turn them into nihilistic wastelands. From the puffed-chest phonies on CNN and MSNBC, we hear a lot about sinister “lobbies” that intimidate passive, cowardly pols. The insufferable Chris Cuomo, whose partisan arrogance is impossible to overstate, rips into this or that Republican for not “standing up” to the NRA. When has Cuomo ever stood up to the morally bankrupt teachers’ unions that turned America’s public schools into assembly lines of pathology?

A Ledyard student was arrested after he allegedly said he could buy a semi-automatic weapon, the principal told parents on Thursday. Ledyard High School Principal Amanda Fagan said the specific purpose to reach out to parents was "to counter some false information that was posted today on a community forum on Facebook. That social media post indicated that a student at the high school had been arrested today for posting on the internet that he was going to shoot up the high school. That information, as presented is false." On Thursday, a 17-year-old student allegedly said "I could buy an...

Judicial Watch Director of Investigations Chris Farrell is calling for the complete abolishment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) beginning with the resignation of its director, Christopher Wray, after failing to protect American citizens. The law enforcement agency has come under scrutiny for becoming too politicized in the probe into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server and the Russian dossier that may have helped authorities obtain FISA warrants to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign officials. “I would go back 200 years to the U.S. Marshal Service. I would create a new division for...

A group of open borders activists blocked and surrounded federal immigration officials in downtown Los Angeles, California on Thursday, preventing the agents from accessing a nearby detention center. Coordinated by a slew of open borders groups, about 50 illegal immigrant activists stopped a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) van of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while they were on their way to a detention center.

— Minnesota set a record last year for the number of gun background checks the FBI conducted in the state. More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains relatively low. WCCO’s Pat Kessler is looking at the numbers, and giving them a Reality Check. We took a hard look at the numbers, and found: Minnesota has a high rate of gun ownership, and a relatively low rate of violent crime. Minnesota’s violent crime rate hit a 50-year low in 2016, according to the FBI.